Six Steps of Life, Measured by Syllable

David Rakoff’s ‘Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish’

Anapestic tetrameter is a much cheerier form of verse than its name suggests. Yes, each line has four feet, and each foot has three syllables, two unstressed and the third delivered with a beat. It is less solemnly known as the singsong meter from “ ’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house” and Dr. Seuss’s “Yertle the Turtle,” and it is playful almost by definition. This is a way of saying that David Rakoff’s first novel, completed only weeks before he died last year at 47, is much sunnier and more heartening than it has any right to be.

The meter is so tricky and incongruous that it becomes this sly, bravura book’s main witticism. In this 113-page, book-length narrative poem, a marvel of gamesmanship, Mr. Rakoff describes hardship, illness, death and depravity, knowing how ingeniously his book’s style and substance would fight each other.

Video

Excerpt: Mindy's Toast

David Rakoff reads an excerpt from his novel “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish,” with feedback from Ira Glass.

Just for starters, Mr. Rakoff enlivens his portrait of Margaret, the first colorful character in a parade of them, with a Dickensian childhood too bouncy to be truly horrifying. Of the nuns who taught Margaret at school and provoked her hatred, he writes: “They meted out lashings and thrashings despotic/(With a thrill she would later construe as erotic).” Margaret’s hard-luck story also includes the facts that her father was trampled by horses and that her stepfather raped and impregnated her. Drawn as a plump, apprehensive baby and then as a sad-eyed, glamorous redhead by the illustrator known as Seth, Margaret adorns a book jacket that is exceptionally attention getting even for its renowned designer, Chip Kidd.

Mr. Rakoff frames “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” as a series of vignettes, in chronological order, that pin different forms of love and disillusionment to different points in time. On their own, each of these stories — like Margaret’s humiliation, set in the 1920s — is more than a little stereotypical. They range from Clifford, a gay man with a highly theatrical mother (“She found it amusing and helped pass the day/To speak like a guest at a fancy soiree”) who comes of age during World War II, to his cousin Helen, one of those ’50s career women who naïvely gets talked into bed by her boss.

His poetic tempo doesn’t keep Mr. Rakoff from stating harsh truths. After Helen has been had by that supervisor:

The hideous reason behind his new glow isWhat Helen — and many just like her — don’t know isThat men’s moods turn light and their spirits expand,The moment they sense an escape is at hand.He patted her cheek as he said, “I’m replenished,”Then off through the crowd for the next train to Greenwich.

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Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

The narrative cliché that this encounter embodies is, in its way, as soothingly familiar as the rhyming.

Mr. Rakoff’s gift for balancing truth telling and humor is most steadily illustrated by Clifford. For one thing, Mr. Rakoff wrote about this gay man with more comic lightness than he brings to tales of ruined virtue. Clifford’s sheer glee at finding himself in San Francisco in its pre-AIDS heyday is manifest on the page. About a trip to an art-house cinema, he delivered both “Look at that queen, that unbearable phony/Wearing full leather to Antonioni,” and “This décor resembles a palace, a mosque or .../How could they deny Judy Garland that Oscar?” But Clifford is also repelled by rich Brahmins who shield themselves from knowledge of the Vietnam War. So he chooses to write obscene superhero comics instead of turning his talents to John Singer Sargent-style elite portraiture.

In the part of the book that inevitably resounds most painfully, Mr. Rakoff, who died of cancer and wove a deep sense of fragility and peril into this book, leads Clifford into the caldron of the AIDS epidemic:

A permeable world where each friend is a trick,Can feel like it’s crumbling when just one gets sick.Add one more for two, and that queasy sensationCan feel like a threat to one’s very foundation.

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David Rakoff, whose last book is a narrative poem.Credit
Deidre Dolan

Yet Mr. Rakoff keeps “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” from sinking into grief by injecting a healthy dose of hypocrisy into its later stages. A social-climbing villainess, known variously as Susan, Sloan or Shulamit, depending on her aspirations at the moment, embodies the situational ethics and materialism of the ’80s and onward.

And Nathan, one of the betrayed men in her life, has the author’s sympathy and affection. One of Mr. Rakoff’s best-loved NPR performance pieces was a version of the old tale of the scorpion and the tortoise, who were headed for tragedy because each would be true to its nature despite promises to the contrary. It is included in a toast Nathan makes at his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. The Rakoff touch is apparent in this episode’s last flourish. The bride’s father can’t argue with a toast that paints his daughter as a scorpion. But he can say, “That toast, if you give it again (but you won’t),/Remember, Nate: turtles swim, tortoises don’t.”

Mr. Rakoff was far too young to have left behind this grace note or any other. But future readers can turn to this book to remember why he was so widely appreciated and is sorely missed. As he mischievously says of death: “Inevitable, why even bother to test it,/He’d paid all his taxes, so that left ... you guessed it.”

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH

A Novel

By David Rakoff

Illustrated. 113 pages. Doubleday. $26.95.

Correction: July 29, 2013

The Books of The Times review on Thursday, about the novel “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” by David Rakoff, misstated the relationship between the character Nathan and the woman at whose wedding he makes a toast. She is his ex-girlfriend, not his ex-wife.

A version of this review appears in print on July 25, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Six Steps Of Life, Measured By Syllable. Today's Paper|Subscribe